So I was an odd child, that's pretty much a given.
Recently, I got my hands on most of my collection of back issues of a certain mineralogical publication, a journal to which I had had a subscription since I was about fourteen. These journals had been in storage for about six years, ever since I realised that I didn't have room for them in either of the apartments that I used to inhabit. They were still in their neat black binders, individually sleeved, with typewritten (!) labels on the spines. As I started flipping through them, quite randomly, I realised something about myself, and about my mineral boyhood. It's not a wildly compelling story, but it explains something of who and what I am now, with reference to what I used to be.
My childhood was just a small slice of a far broader and more complex pattern of upbringing. Part of it had to do with the environment, on which we won't dwell much just now. Another part was natural inclination, and curiosity about the world. Still more was a quest for familial approval.
I was a shy, quiet child. I was also a bright child, if unfocused and undirected (a pattern which has persisted in my adult life). In fact, when I think about my early school days, it's with a combination of the angst of having few (or no) friends, and the uncertainty which that bred.
I don't make any bones about being clever. I was, I am, and that's an end of it. I try not to let it overrun my life, as it makes it difficult to keep friends if you're the one always noticing and correcting other people's "errors", but when I'm occasionally accused of pomposity or superiority or just "not fitting in well", then I realise that I'm failing, that the old defenses of humour and self-deprecation are coming down. And guess what? Sometimes, I just don't give a damn, as a nod to the child I was who suffered his share of abuse for being "the smart kid".
As a clever child, I didn't exactly have a lot of close friends, and not fitting in was an art that I perfected. Later in life, that becomes an advantage. Sometimes. When you're naturally awkward and not in a school that celebrates and encourages individual gifts, being bright doesn't tend to go so well. I had my own frames of reference, my own interests, and practically none of these jived with the world of American children in the late 70s and early 80s. I was interested in a lot of things. I kept a scrapbook of photos from the Voyager missions, clipped tidily from the newspapers (at the time, publishing a colour photograph, as they occasionally did, was a big deal). I liked rockets, and reading. And another good example of my non-conformity was my interest in rocks and minerals... geology, mineralogy, and paleontology.
I first learned about minerals and rocks as part of a scout project. Scouting was yet another instance of a common boyhood activity in which I didn't really manage to distinguish myself. I played baseball, but I was terrible at it. I also couldn't build one of those little pinewood cars to save my life. Tools were not my friend, and I was just as likely to break something with a hammer as I was to strike a nail in the prescribed fasion. But when it came to some of the requirements, like collecting, I was in good shape.
In this case, I was to make a collection, and I did, with some help - twelve different minerals in an egg box. There was a bit of quartz, a piece of blue-dyed quartzite, a small round nodule of obsidian of the kind now called an apache tear, a piece of rose quartz, a bit of labradorite... honestly, I can't remember what the others were. Probably some calcite, and apatite crystal, a sand spar or a barite rose... The collection soon grew to a second egg box. Then, a third. It was all part of seeking parental approval: my father and my grandfather were both collectors, and my great-uncle was a turquoise dealer in Arizona, so it was something that we could have in common. So my interest grew.
At some point, I started subscribing to one of the key publications in mineralogy, still influential today, the
Mineralogical Record. This big step was followed by another: I was going to collect all of the back issues of the magazine. My subscription must have started in the early to mid 1980s, which meant that I had some rare issues to find, going all the way back to 1970. Eventually, I owned ever single one of them - and still do - using money that I'd earned mowing lawns in the summer. Of course, with my gap in subscribing from the late 90s until last year, guess what? There's a hole in the collection again, and it will be considerably more expensive to fill than it was when I was fifteen.
While most kids spent their Saturday mornings watching cartoons, I routinely spent time at "rock shows". Not only was there a local one, held yearly, but we travelled, to Omaha and Topeka and Lawrence and other locales, as I recall. If you've never been to a rock show, or, as they are more often billed, a "gem and mineral show", then it's an interesting exercise in social dynamics, or, at the very least, people-watching.
In those days, there were local rock shops as well, about a half-dozen of them, operated by grizzled old men who had been youthful when mineralogy and rock hounding had really taken off in the 1950s. Again, while other kids my age were focused on radio controlled cars, I had a rock hammer, and if I wasn't using it, we were going to rock shops. One of these, the recently demised Ace's Rock Shop, which used to be a fixture of the Westport district, it was run by a family of devoted lithophiles, although in the end, they were subsumed in the tide of nonsense which has overtaken popular rock hounding, that of the metaphysical, crystal-gazing, energy-sensing, omphaloskeptic idiocy which is loosely called "New Age" thinking. Though I preferred book shops, I'd go along to the rock shops happily enough. There was a certain magic in the neatly ordered display cases, the rows of hammers and chisels and goggles, the reference books and loupes. I think that all of those rock shops of my boyhood, like the old independent bookshops and small second-hand places, are long since gone.
Of course, there was also time in the field. Roadcuts, old quarries, hikes through various terrains when out for Sunday drives or visiting relatives: I spent a lot of time - through at least some of which I was bored, if I'm being honest - wandering around, looking at rocks. Whether it was looking at the remains of glacial deposits in Nebraska (and subsequently getting badly lost, in the days before GPS, driving round seemingly endless rural roads until finally stumbling on a small town after several hours and with low fuel remaining), or driving to sandstone quarries to hunt for fern fossils, or just walking along a gradient in a gravel pit and picking crinoid stems up off of the ground, there were many, many activities, and a lot of time spent out of doors. I learned, at least somewhat, how to read maps put out by various state Geological Surveys. When I did find things, it gave me a sense of accomplishment. In a field which was littered with things dropped by glaciers in their last retreat ten thousand years ago, for example, I saw a small reddish shape which looked like nothing more or less than discarded chewing gum. I picked it up anyway, and found that it was a small red garnet, which had probably travelled down from the Dakotas or Canada. And I found pockets of calcite, brachiopods, and other fossils... never have yet found a trilobite, though.
As my taste and - dare I say it - sophistication grew, so that soon, ordering minerals by post, I developed favourites and fancies for minerals from far distant places. I still have a soft spot for pyromorphite, a lead phosphate mineral found in the mining all around the world, which occurs in gorgeous clusters of barrel-shaped crystals. To me, minerals are still beautiful things.
Of course, with age came a rejection of childish things. Although I studied geology and the sciences at university, ultimately I took a degree in history. For a long time, although I kept up a superficial interest in the earth beneath my feet, I wasn't all that engaged with it; not like I had been. After many years, though, I've come back to relying on my knowledge of geology and my interest in the earth sciences, because it helps in the bigger battles against unreason, in which my humanist side demands me to take part.
Still, in a way, I miss all of the exuberance and fun of boyhood rambles, unfettered by the damned demands of adult life. My course through life and a declining interest in mineralogy has been mirrored in the larger world. If you search for "rock shops" in the Kansas City metro area... well, there aren't many. Mainly, it's just the
Beagle, a place on north Oak called Clevenger's, and, from personal experience, I know that there's one small case in that toyshop in Brookside. Is that the marker of a hobby on the decline? If so, it would make me a bit sad. So now, ironically, I'm trying to foster an interest in the very subject about which I have such contradictory feelings, to expose a new generation of children to the interesting things to be found in the mineral world.
My mineral boyhood in some ways shaped the person that I am, and, oddly enough, that doesn't bother me as much as it used to.
is a vast, terrifying, giant brick of a book. It's a bit like looking at Tolstoy's War and Peace (come to think of it, I never finished that one either). It's daunting. It's intimidating.
